tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post8609602809723712509..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: The Future Is The Same As It Ever Was for 2016Dale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-50480985449959055422015-12-31T20:43:39.651-08:002015-12-31T20:43:39.651-08:00> Big AI (again)
You mean Big Gay Al?
Big gay...> Big AI (again)<br /><br />You mean Big Gay Al?<br /><br />Big gay Al - I'm super!<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYNuoCigGY<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-71802379313366411362015-12-31T20:38:09.952-08:002015-12-31T20:38:09.952-08:00(Ben Goertzel, cont'd 2)
And now, it's qu...(Ben Goertzel, cont'd 2)<br /><br />And now, it's quite different than when I was a kid. . .<br />When I was a kid, the gadgets we had in our house were<br />the same year after year. It was five years or something<br />before you got some slightly new form of technology. . .<br />Now, I can't learn to use all the features of my new phone<br />before the phone becomes obsolete and there's a new one<br />that comes out. Trying to keep up with all the radical<br />innovations in science and technology -- actually, you'd<br />just be reading the news all day. You can't keep up with<br />it all. This is an unprecedented situation. It indicates that<br />we are rapidly moving toward what Kurzweil, Vinge and others<br />have called a Singularity. . . What if there's a new<br />Nobel-prize-worthy scientific discovery every five seconds?<br />A new technological revolution every hour? . . .<br />You're in a domain where I. J. Good's statement that the<br />first intelligent machine is the last invention humanity<br />needs to make becomes very relevant. . . It's not going to<br />be human beings inventing things at this pace, at least not<br />human beings in the current sense of biological life-forms<br />with brains very similar to those that have been evolving<br />for tens and hundred of thousands of years. . .<br />Suppose this progress is really leading up<br />to a rate of progress that's infinite from the point of<br />view of human psychology. How are we going to make sense<br />of all this? What does life mean when there's nearly<br />infinite intelligence next door or even inside your brain,<br />when you have the possibility of taking your mind out<br />of your brain and pouring it into some different substrate,<br />into a robot, into a video game, into -- maybe some organization<br />of light and degenerate matter as the Russian cosmists of<br />a long time ago foresaw. How do you make sense of life in<br />this context? What is the meaning of anything? This is<br />really what Cosmism as a philosphy tries to address. . .<br />Transhumanism, as a philosophy and way of thinking, is very<br />very broad. . . It doesn't intrinsically say what we should<br />try to become or why, it's more transcending, being extropic,<br />going beyond traditional humanity. Cosmism is actually a<br />richer philosophy and tries to give an integrated point of<br />view on what is the meaning of going beyond humanity. . .<br />The term Cosmism came out of the Russian cosmists. . .<br />As I've recounted, these ideas are things that I came into<br />contact with from science fiction well before I heard of<br />the Russian cosmists -- [knew that] Fyodorov and Tsiolkovsky<br />and all these guys existed. . . Giulio Prisco and I<br />worked together on a brief series of principles. . . that<br />characterize Cosmism. Humans will merge with our technology --<br />could be mind uploading, brain-computer interfacing, transmitting<br />our ideas and our memeplexes to AGIs. . .<br />====<br /><br />I blame it on the Bossa Nova. ;-><br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-26059970935344352072015-12-31T20:36:37.764-08:002015-12-31T20:36:37.764-08:00(Ben Goertzel, cont'd)
By the time I got to u...(Ben Goertzel, cont'd)<br /><br />By the time I got to university in the 1980s, things seemed<br />a bit different. For one thing, I'd learned to program the<br />computer when I was 13 or 14 years old, which was harder then<br />than now. . . But once you have a computer and you can program,<br />then you start to see there's a lot of power there, and you start<br />to think, well, some of these amazing things **could** be done<br />in your own lifetime because, programming, you can create<br />whatever world you think of inside that computer, and if you<br />have a computer that's just a bit more powerful, maybe you<br />could create a mind or a universe, or a set of artificial<br />organisms, whatever you want inside that computer. Once I<br />saw the power of programming, I started to think perhaps<br />one could actually do some of these things inside our lifetime.<br />Perhaps you could create a thinking machine just by figuring<br />out the right sequence of commands to type on that little<br />computer. Perhaps you could figure out how to make people<br />not die by simulating the human body inside that computer.<br />Perhaps you could program a virtual reality there and somehow<br />jump into it. There's a lot of power in being able to type<br />whatever code you like. It makes you think differently about<br />the universe as well, leading to ideas like, maybe this whole<br />universe is just a big computer. You see you can program<br />whatever world you want in that computer, well, that leads<br />immediately to the idea of the Matrix, which was already<br />there in loads of earlier science fiction novels. Maybe<br />this world we're in now is just programmed by some other alien<br />13-year-old kid in another universe programming a video<br />game, and we're just random non-player characters inside his<br />video game. My thinking shifted due to computer technology,<br />and I started to think maybe we can do all these things inside<br />our own lifetime. I recount this ancient history not just<br />because I'm a nostalgic old man, but because it's indicative<br />of exponential progress of the whole. . . progress toward<br />the Singularity. The fact that during my own lifetime things<br />could go from an attitude of wow, how would we ever do<br />these things in our lifetime to all of a sudden you have<br />computers, you have the internet, you have a supercomputer in<br />your pocket. Where I live in Hong Kong, every person in the<br />street is constantly walking around staring at their<br />pocket supercomputer, not looking at the world around them.<br />The fact that you can see these changes within a single person's<br />lifetime is indicative of the fact that we live in a very<br />unusual time, where we're approaching what Ray Kurzweil,<br />Vernor Vinge, and others have called the Technological<br />Singularity. When you think about it, for most of human<br />history, we didn't have this type of situation. People living<br />in Australian Aboriginal tribes or Medieval Europe, most of<br />your life, things are just the same as they were. . .<br />When you die, the knowledge available is about the same<br />as when you were born. . . Very very few changes and<br />innovations would have happened during a typical person's<br />lifetime. The last couple hundred years are quite different. . .<br /><br />(cont'd 2)<br />jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-51273361232184708382015-12-31T20:33:36.311-08:002015-12-31T20:33:36.311-08:00> Fear not, that bleeding edge future can still...> Fear not, that bleeding edge future can still be regurgitated <br /><br />Ben Goertzel Talk on Modern Cosmism Conference NYC 10/10/15<br />Cosmism Foundation<br />Published on Oct 19, 2015<br />What will the advent of advanced AI and robotics mean for humanity?<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ywYwIlCrc<br />---------------<br />I'm going to start by describing what Cosmism means to me,<br />and the ideas underlying what I think of as Cosmism<br />are really things I learned when I was a child from reading<br />science fiction, well before I knew that the Russian<br />"cosmists" had even existed. I grew up in the early 1970s,<br />first of all, watching the original _Star Trek_ on TV<br />with my dad, which was pretty cool. You had Spock with<br />the pointy ears and Captain Kirk all macho beating up the<br />aliens, and then. . . Each week you had a new strange<br />alien civilizations or intelligent robots with the defective<br />minds -- all these things seemed a lot more interesting<br />than what was going on at school or in my local neighborhood.<br />So that definitely grabbed my mind, and I started grabbing<br />all the science fiction novels I could find, and there,<br />as everyone who's gone through the science fiction of the<br />40s, 50s and 60s knows, pretty much every possible<br />futurist idea was there in some science fiction story,<br />from superintelligent oceans, all sorts of, kinds of Singularities,<br />minds and aliens of different sorts all over the galaxy,<br />virtual realities, I mean it's all there in some science<br />fiction or other. The plot and the characterization aren't<br />necessarily the best -- sometimes they are, sometimes they<br />aren't -- but the **ideas** are amazing. And I grew up<br />with all that. And I really wanted to see all these amazing<br />superintelligences and alien civilizations and virtual<br />realities, and get to become a robot and fly through stars<br />and talk to superintelligent black holes, and go to<br />other universes, and. . . I didn't see how that was going<br />to happen in my lifetime, living in Eugene, Oregon in<br />the early 70s. It's a cool place, a lot of hippies hanging<br />out in the park, strumming the guitar, marching to protest<br />the Vietnam War and so on, but I couldn't see how we were<br />going to get superintelligent robots flying through black<br />holes in my lifetime. It seemed like everyone was just<br />hanging out smoking weed and enjoying themselves, basically,<br />so -- not that there's anything wrong with that, but. . .<br />I conceived a plan to build a spacecraft which would fly<br />away from Earth at close to the speed of light and then come<br />back to Earth like a million years later when all these amazing<br />things would have finally been achieved, right? And there<br />was some logic to that. . . If you could fly away at .9 of c<br />and come back in a million years, surely while you were having<br />fun on that spacecraft for a couple years, many people would've<br />been working for a thousand generations on Earth to create AI<br />and longevity pills and super robots and whatever else you wanted.<br />Seemed like a decent plan, so I figured I would spend my life<br />making a propulsion mechanism that would let me go away from<br />Earth and come back in the future.<br /><br />(cont'd)jimfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04975754342950063440noreply@blogger.com